Chapter II · The Authority Of Faith And The Free Exercise Of Research. (continued 2)

The great discoverer Galvani complained of being attacked from two opposite sides, by the scientists and by the ignorant: “Both make fun of me. They call me the dancing master of frogs. Yet I know I have discovered one of the greatest forces of nature.”

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When Benjamin Franklin explained the lightning-rod to the Royal Academy of Sciences, he was ridiculed as a dreamer. The same happened to Young with his theory of the undulation of light. “The Edinburgh Review” proposed to the public to put Thomas Grey in a strait-jacket when he presented his plan for railroads. Sir Humphry Davy laughed at the idea of illuminating the city of London by gas. The French Academy of Sciences actually sneered at the physicist Arago when he proposed a resolution to merely open a discussion of the idea of an electric telegraph (Wallace, Die wissensch. Ansicht des Uebernatuerlichen, 102 seq.).

Until about a hundred years ago scientists almost universally thought it impossible for a stone to fall from the skies—not to mention a rain of stones. Of the big meteor that fell at Agram in 1751 the learned Vienna professor, Stuetz, wrote in 1790 as follows: “That iron had fallen from the skies may have been believed in Germany in 1751 even by its enlightened minds, owing to the uncertainty then prevailing in regard to physics and natural history. In our times, however, it were unpardonable to consider similar fairy tales even probable.”Some museums threw away their collections of meteors, fearing they would appear ridiculous by keeping them. In that very year, 1790, a meteor fell near the city of Juillac in France, and the mayor of the town sent a report of it to the French Academy of Sciences, signed by three hundred eye-witnesses. But the wise men of the academy knew better. Referee Bertholon said: “It is a pity for a town to have so foolish a mayor,” and added: “It is sad to see the whole municipality certifying by affidavit to a folk-saga that can only be pitied. What more can I say of an affidavit like that? Comment is self-evident to a philosophically trained mind who reads this authentic testimonial about an evidently false fact, about a physically impossible phenomenon.” A. Deluc, in other respects a sober-minded man, and a scientist, even remarked that should a stone like that fall before his feet, then he would have to admit that he had seen it, but nevertheless would not believe it. Vaudin remarked: “Better to deny such incredible things than to have to try to explain them.” Thus taught the French Academy of that time (apud Braun, Ueber Kosmogonie, 3d ed., 1905, 378 seq.). And now science is teaching the contrary. Everybody knows that such falling meteors are not only possible, but that they fall about seven hundred times a year on our earth.

Do not these examples bear a striking resemblance to the attitude of many of the representatives of modern science towards facts and truths of our faith?

This has not been said with a view of detracting from the [pg 120] reputation of science. Not at all. It has fallen to the lot of man to be subject to error. The above was said to recall that fact. Science is not so infallible as to be able to claim the right to ignore, in religious and ethical questions, faith and the Church, and even to usurp the place of the faith given by God, in order to lead its disciples upon the new paths of a delivered mankind.

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